an instrument of God. My
honor, my consistency, my character consists in faithfulness to God's
love, God's truth, and nothing else. Let me be but true to Him--how
then can I be false to either man or the world? It is Him who knows
our secret thoughts that we should fear (if fear we must) and obey."

Thus it was Anglicanism that engaged Isaac Hecker's last efforts to
adjust a Protestant outside to his inward experience with the Holy
Spirit; and this for a reason quite evident. That body pretended,
then as now, to be the Catholic Christian Church, assisting men to
union with God by a divinely-founded external organism, but not
demanding the sacrifice of human liberty. To an inexperienced
observer such as he, it seemed possible that Anglicanism might be the
union of historical Christianity with manly freedom. Closer
observation proved to him not only the compatibility of Catholicity
and liberty, but that Anglicanism, though assuming some of the forms
of Catholic unity, is kept alive by the principle of individual
separatism common to all Protestant sects. For a time, or in a place,
it may have much or little of Catholicity; but in no place can it
live for a day without the Protestant principle of a right of final
appeal to the individual judgment to decide upon the verity of
doctrine.

________________________

CHAPTER XIV

HIS LIFE AT CONCORD

"I HAVE been groping in darkness, seeking where Thou wast not, and I
found Thee not. But, O Lord my God, _Thou hast found me_--leave me
not."

These words are part of a long prayer written by Isaac Hecker in his
diary April 23, 1844, after his arrival at Concord, Mass. He appears
to have gone directly there from Carlisle, Pa., where he had spent
some days with the Rev. William Herbert Norris, whose published
letter to "A Sincere Enquirer" had excited in the young man a hope
that he might find in him a teacher whose deep inward experiences
would be complemented by the adequate external guaranty that he was
seeking. We have already noted that he was disappointed. He states
the reason very suggestively in a letter written at the time:

"Alas, that men should speak of those things they are most ignorant
of! What hopes did he not awaken in my bosom as I read his letter to
a Sincere Enquirer, and how were they blasted when I met him and
found that it was not he, but Hooker, Newman, Paul, etc.! It is a sad
fact that many believe, but very few give themselves up to what the